THe last President to have no business or military experience or governing experience was Warren Harding. He took his vast experience as a journalist and became widely regarded as the worst President ever.
The next most recent President with Warren/Obama/Harding levels of inexperience was Abraham Lincoln. But Lincoln is an exception that proves the rule. While a great President, his greatness was a product of his circumstances. He was the right man for the right time. His management skills were negligible and actually hampered the war effort.
Now, if we’re going to go to war against the great nation of JP Goldman Bankistan, Warren’s the one you want. If you want the government to actually work with a minimum of dysfunction, you need someone who has proven they can make it work.
BTW, after Lincoln, we have that giant, Franklin Pierce, and that’s it for Presidents with no management experience.
Reality. Now it’s true that the office of President as originally conceived didn’t require extraordinary men. The duties are not all that demanding as originally written, and sure enough most Presidents before WWII spent as much time on vacation, mostly out of touch, as they did in the White House actually working.
But with a complex government with a vast bureaucracy comes the need for someone with the necessary skills to manage it. We know what happens when the President doesn’t bother. We get weekly stories of failure in the executive branch.
Now the voters may tolerate that consistent record of incompetence, or like many of you, choose not to blame the President for his own administration’s failures. That’s everyone’s right in a republic. However, denying it’s happening is just denying reality. What we’re seeing in the federal government today is an uncontrollable, unaccountable bureaucracy that can’t do much right, and with a political situation where the President is unwilling to take responsibility and his supporters are unwilling to make him take responsibility, it’s not going to get better anytime soon.
The thing I don’t understand is why his supporters would allow such damage to be done to the idea of activist government. Every negative story helps my side.
Most of them were failures. So now we have more than 12 years of government running amok without accountability. Let’s not make this the new normal. The public is down on government as it is.
Now GWB, remember what I said earlier about how governors perform about as well as they did at the state level as at President? He’s a prime example.
This is a guy who failed at every management job he ever had. Sure, he had loads of experience, and a consistent track record ranging from mediocrity to failure. If his name wasn’t Bush he would never have been considered.
Wait, so now we’re saying that business experience is relevant? If it is, it’s negatively so, in that those with business experience seem to make worse presidents, not better. They keep on insisting on “running the government like a business”, which usually seems to mean “Bankrupt it and gut the corpse to put together a golden parachute”.
I don’t think we’ve ever had a true businessman in the Presidency before. It’s usually either someone who made some money in between holding political offices using their connections, or the son of a rich businessman who couldn’t be trusted with the family business so his dad bought him the Presidency.
But a geniunely successful businessman like Romney I would have trusted, and I’d trust Larry Ellison or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or either of the Koch brothers, at least in terms of being able to competently manage a large organization.
Bush 41 was a Congressman, which I counted as national legislative experience. He ran for Senate, too.
Nixon was a Senator.
So we’re back up to 6 of 11. Only four governors. VP’s run nothing larger than their offices.
Before that? Hoover. Who was a self-made millionaire as a businessman, as Tom Scud noted, and failed utterly as a president. Before him Coolidge, Governor, and Harding, Senator.
There was an odd little cluster of Governors from Reagan to Bush. The historic importance of that disappears with a puff when the larger picture is examined. I’ve been focusing on your statement of very few Senators being elected because it has no foundation in fact, cannot be used to show superiority of Senators v. Governors, and shows a blithe ignorance of actual history. As does your statement on businessmen.
Why should I accept any of your opinions on Obama’s leadership when I can’t accept any of the supposed facts you are using as a base for those opinions?
Harding was a “journalist”, but it’s not like he was a newspaper reporter, but instead an owner and manager. He bought a struggling newspaper on the verge of bankruptcy and turned it into the most successful newspaper in the county. As the New York Times put it in Harding’s obituary
People don’t hesitate to call Rupert Murdoch a “businessman”, even though his line is the media. So, why deny that label to Harding?
As far as Pierce, he certainly had military experience, commanding a brigade in the battle for Mexico City during the Mexican War.
You are completely disregarding the complete and utter racism that has enveloped the Right wing majority of our Congress and our country.
Whether or not Obama has enough experience as a leader or not is moot in the face of the fact that the Repugnants in congress are unwilling, And have said as much, repeatedly, that they will make his presidency a complete and utter failure. They will pass no laws or court any of candidates for positions.
The constituency of the Right wing nuts like adaher, are the same ones that characterized Obama as a bone in his nose Kenyan with no real birth certificate… Shame on you.
He may have said My Way or the Highway but it was only after Boner and his Majority repugnants said that people of color and immigrants would get nowhere in their government.
Romney owed a fair amount of his success to getting the government to pay for things - he made the Olympics work by lobbying the federal government for vast sums, and when he ran Massachusetts he likewise offloaded costs from state to federal government. If he ran the federal government, who would he get to bail him out?
Because you didn’t pay attention. My argument was that it’s not good to elevate someone directly from the Senate to the Presidency with no executive experience.
And sure enough, we get yet more headlines today about how Obama has no idea whatsoever about what is going on in his own administration. His comments on the NSA were completely ignorant. It’s amazing how easily the media finds things out that he never bothers to.